Cutter wrote on Sep 13, 2014, 18:47:The shine on crowdfunding has definitely worn off for a lot of people and that will only continue as projects fail, turn out to be shit, and scams all increase.

I'm not sure that's it. I've backed around 20 games or so up until now, and I think 7-8 have delivered by now. I've been happy with all of them except one which turned out to be a complete disaster (Jane Jensen's Moebius). And yet I find myself much less likely to back anything right about now.

I think it's mostly because I'm kind of at capacity. I'm still waiting on a lot of my backed projects, and I haven't finished playing some of those that already finished. Something has to impress me rather a lot now to back it, just because I don't need more game, including in niche genres that were previously dormant.

It affects my attention span. An acquaintance suggested I back Seldon Crisis the other day, but after one look at the pitch vid and the first few sentences of description I was out. It was just a CG space battle, nothing that indicates in any way they have the chops or a plan for how to realize the ambitious game they want to make, and their goal sum is much too low for a MMO. And I wouldn't have time to play it anyway, so what's the point? I'm not adverse to spending money for vote-with-my-wallet activism reasons, I guess, but then they'd have had to convince me that's worthy of it fast ...

I think it ultimately comes down to a variety of factors culminating in whether you believe a pitch will follow through and deliver on its promises. If you have no established track record, showing a more substantial prototype can definitely help with generating that.

Apparently the way they went about doing this is to strap an Unreal Engine 3 layer to the original "gameplay engine". I bet it's a colossal hack where they essentially run the old game offscreen and shuttle data forth and back to keep the two halves in sync (the failed Kickstarter for Outcast HD used the same technique, check out their vids to get an idea of it). That might explain why they found it hard to wire up mouse support in a few ways I can sort of imagine. It actually makes for an interesting curiosity, I'd love to see their code.

Speaking as a developer: You're generally right, I'm sitting here wondering what situation they managed to corner themselves into that it wasn't trivial to add at least basic pointer handling. Perhaps they used some terrible middleware for their UI layer and had trouble hooking things up, or their menu system is based entirely around some sort of abstract nav tree data structure and they had no time to mark things up for pointer intersection tests, or they have lots of complex screens where mouse support would have called for stuff beyond basic clicks like DND (I don't remember the menus anymore).

Still, it's not really rocket science. Worst case they could have licensed Scaleform or whatever (assuming they're not using it already) and wired the menus up from scratch. Either they were too time or budget constrained for dev hours or have a shit codebase they did't want to risk having to touch too much and break things.

Considering the original didn't have a proper save system, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the latter (if your game engine can't serialize and deserialize state for savegames you planned badly). Unless that was a "genius" design idea.

Cutter wrote on Sep 9, 2014, 10:28:Never heard of him. What did he win an award for? Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence?

He was a project lead / lead writer on some great adventure games by German company House of Tales.

The Moment of Silence was a fairly typical near-future political dystopia on the face of it, but approached in an interesting way (the protagonist works in an ad agency effectively doing propaganda for the government, which leads to his involvement in the plot). Overclocked dealt with complex themes around violence and PTSD and had a really ambitious story structure. Both are easily among the strongest adventures of their time period.

And then it all fell apart financially, resulting in 15 Days being rushed to market and released in a really lackluster condition, and Ganteföhr left (pre-release even? I can't fully recall the details) and House of Tales folded.

The guy's got a lot of fans in the adventure gaming community. I made a little jump in my seat when I read this news. Putting Ganteföhr together with the most stable and productive adventure house around right now seems like a great foundation ...

jdreyer wrote on Sep 7, 2014, 03:20:So your phone has four cores, but you can't USE four cores. At least not in anything more than a very short burst.

It depends on your definition of "using". In practice a CPU core will often go idle briefly even while a process is technically using it (e.g. because it's waiting on I/O), and power management then works to let it descend into various sleep states that e.g. turn parts of the chip off via clock gating to have it draw less power - and thus also leak less heat. A situation where all four cores are at C0 (not sleeping) for any length of time is going to be rare in practice. And even at meager utilization multi-core can have performance benefits, especially because mobile CPU cores are traditionally not really designed for ILP.

That said, I'm sure there are offenders in the smartphone industry who push down on the thermal envelope too aggressively.

eRe4s3r wrote on Sep 7, 2014, 09:28:And more hilariously, the games where it matters most (Simulations) have been skimping on properly utilizing 64bit.. and thus we gained nothing from 64bit even though it's now supported.

Well, apples and oranges, though. The reason the industry was able to pull the wool over consumer's eyes on 64 bit is that the average consumer simply isn't qualified to understand what it actually means (and so they could get away with ludicrous claims); with 4k displays, the difference is right in your face.

The scaling would be OK, yeah, but if I want to run a 4k monitor on my current GPU at 60 Hz my only option is to use DisplayPort MST, which means it shows up as two monitors in my OS, with all the software/driver-side headache that brings with it (though admittedly it's fairly painfree with nVidia). And HDMI 2.0 means getting a new GPU.

I'm really hoping to upgrade to a 24" 4k monitor next year (up from my 1920x1200 24-incher). What I look most at on my PC's screen during any given day is actually text, and smartphone/tablet screens have spoiled me so much now - I can't fucking stand the blurry 100ppi mess on my desktop anymore. As soon as there's something affordable and low-latency with a good IPS panel I'm in, I think. I'm aware of the UP2414Q but it just doesn't tick all the boxes yet ...

No clue how I'm going to handle the GPU side (I ain't made of money either), but I'm so ready for dat density.

Cutter wrote on Sep 4, 2014, 22:59:And what would the point be in doing EA for an adventure game?

I was surprised, too (I'm a backer). Basically they have split the game into five chapters and are releasing them ASAP one by one via Early Access. Early Access is free for all backers who put in $25 or more, which is a relatively low bar compared to other campaigns doing EA (I backed much more since I loved their earlier games). I guess it allows us backers to participate more closely from here on out or something. But I'm not really sure I'll play it before it's done.

Julio wrote on Sep 3, 2014, 20:44:If there's 'fucking stupidity' on both sides, I assume it would also apply to the 'uncomfortable' poster who's mostly sitting on the fence...

Sure, I've been known to occassionally be stupid.

Anyway, I'm actually sorry I wrote that post in that way. It was shitty style, both for retreading already-covered ground and acting as if you're "not in the room". I think we should be better than that with one another in here even when in disagreement, so again, sorry.